If you do not know where you are going, then any road will take you there.

Technology is a scary word to most people because it immediately conjures up images of highly complex machinery with sili- con chips and flashing lights. That certainly is technology, but so is the piece of rope in the bank in front of the tellers, which marks out where to queue. Remember days gone by, when, every time you visited the bank, you always seemed to be in the queue that was moving the slowest? Remember those hoppers who jumped from one queue to another in the hope of getting to the front faster?

Then somebody said: “Hey, why not put a set of poles there with a rope so that there is only one queue – it stops the queue-hopping.” The interesting side effect is that the banks report a large decrease in the number of complaints to tellers and arguments with tellers. Why? Well, the ‘rope trick’ means that people stand calmly and wait their turn, which means that they are calm when they get to a teller. Queue-hopping of the parallel queues raised everyone’s blood pressure and, by the time a person with a small problem reached the teller, this unhappy customer had escalated the problem, and was then ready for a real fight with the battered teller.

The ‘rope queue’ is a technology. A technological solution is, in essence, a system that works. Let me give another illustration – say you drive to work and it takes 25 minutes to cover 20 km and, one day, you discover a shortcut and it now takes only 20 minutes to cover 17 km. That is a technological improvement. You did not change the car, retrain the driver, or change the petrol, but you did work smarter. If that driver had been a company delivery service, or a manufacturing production line, the savings in time, petrol and maintenance would translate into extra money in the bank.

So, technology is not only high tech; it is also low tech, and it is not only ‘things you can kick’, but is also a system or process. In other words, companies have technologies all around them, all of which have the potential to be improved. Also important is that it is not only a technologically trained person who can improve a technology. It did not take a BSc to invent the bank ‘rope trick’ or find the shortcut to work.

This brings me to another topic, that of business strategy, and then tactics. An army going into battle has a strategy; for example, cross the river and capture the high ground. That is the strategy. How you actually accomplish the strategy is by applying tactics.

Business is the same. Many businesses do not have a clear strategy, even if they frequently believe that they do. If they do have the strategy in place, often the tactics on how to actually achieve it are vague. Strategy and tactics together are really nothing more than a very good plan. But this planning is not so easy. In fact, it often appears deceptively easy so that people are easily conned into thinking that the task is a piece of cake. Make no mistake, strategy formulation is hard work that requires real imaginative thinking. This thinking has to be done by teams – one person cannot do it alone.

A really good plan upfront makes it much easier to do the job later in the most efficient and productive manner.

An interesting snippet of history is that the world’s first nuclear reactor was built in a squash court at the University of Chicago in 1942. It was built out of a pile of graphite bricks, rope, pipes and a few other goodies. In the early years, reactors were called nuclear piles. The first pile was built by only a handful of people but they really knew what they were doing – they had a top-notch plan! Thankfully for them, the university authorities did not know what these brainy mavericks were up to. Imagine building your own nuclear reactor by hand in your own backyard today!

Another real necessity in business today is to know what you are selling. Everyone is ‘selling’ something, maybe it is your letter-writing skills or organisational skills, or ability to survive a crisis. But now, let us allow our minds to drift for a moment. Consider the question: What does Revlon sell? Think about it.

Okay, who said cosmetics? Okay, not wrong, but let us think more fundamentally: what do they really sell? Did someone say chemicals, or creams, or waxes, or colourants? Again not wrong, but what Revlon really sells is hope. Think about it for a moment.

That is why the jar of night cream is a beautiful object – with gold lettering and frosted glass, and it is small. The lady is buying a well-packaged dream. She is buying ‘I want to look better after I use this’. You do not buy night cream in special 20 kg discount packs in no-name brand packaging at the supermarket. Wrong image, even if it works. Just as well. Not only must the company know exactly what it ‘sells’ – a dream, and not a cream – but each individual employee must also know what he or she actually sells and to whom. Who is your customer?

Who is the customer of the man spray-painting cars on a production line? No, it is not the person who buys the car. That person is the customer of the retail company. The customer of the spray painter is the quality control inspector at the end of that particular section of the production line. He is the one that the spray painter has to keep happy. He is the one who accepts or rejects the work. In any company, no matter how large or small, there are many ‘customers’, many ‘products to sell’ and a variety of technology strategies to achieve those goals.

Technology, strategy and business planning are for everyone. Not only the boss.